Are you really happy with yourself?

I was teaching a group of youth and asked them, “How do you focus on God?” One said I don’t; I get up, eat and then play. I challenged the group to read about God and some talked about how it’s hard with all they have to do.

I asked them what is one thing that they can guarantee 100% will happen to them, and they all said die. I then asked them if they have known of any friends that have died. Out of about 18 youth, 2 of them had lost someone in their lives. I tried to get them to really think about this. Why do we do what we do? If God is who we believe in, and He asks us to love him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30) then how can you not focus at least 1% of your day on God?

I know I cannot do anything to earn favor with God. I also know that He has done so much for me I want to serve Him with gratitude. Based on this, do we really believe that God has saved us and we are full of gratitude to serve him?

Have we, as a nation, built a lifestyle that does not need God? What country are you from and how are your youth? How can we challenge each other to seek God and use all we have to serve Him? How, as a parent, have you shown your kids that you rely on God?

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.Romans 12:2(NIV)

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I think the problem is that with wealth and health comes the sinful, stealthy pride that leads to the self-deception of not thinking that one needs God in one’s life. It’s a theme found throughout the scriptures, the weakness of the flesh in being rich and self-reliant, or worse yet, believing in the “self made man” lie: http://www.boingboing.net/features/savage.html

America is one of the very few nations on earth that has developed such an extensive culture of death avoidance, death sanitation, a culture of extensive support networks for depravity and sin acceptance, and a complete and utter mind-washing of the disastrous effects of both physical and spiritual death; no one thinks about it here, because it’s not considered acceptable! Rewind to the Victorian/Edwardian era in both the rising power of the U.S. of A. as well as Great Britain, and death was such a common thing in the days before adequate medicine, and in an era of such total inequity of wealth where only the most filthy-rich persons could even afford “decent” medical care anyway, and you find that children actually had funerary dolls to play with, complete with little doll coffins! It’s no wonder that the Goth community embraces not only the Victorian and Edwardian clothing ethos, but the entire mindset of being constantly surrounded by doom, gloom, misery and death; Goths are realists. Goths see through the commonly-accepted deceptions foisted upon us by a near mutual consensus that this is how we should live, and they throw it back in everyone elses’ faces so that we can see the lies for what they really are.

They who die with the most toys… still die, and then the judgment, but no one wants to hear that inconvenient truth.

Take for example the most recent celebrity death, where a probably drunken Ryan Dunn got himself and a friend killed in a high-impact mating between his Porsche and a pole. Already on most message boards, the coarse joking, revelry, and general disrespect for decency are being played out in force as most of this person’s peer group tries to lessen the personal impact of this… cultural “hero” of audacity’s departure from this world.

Now read that VERY carefully. All inflammatory rhetoric aside, if you had never known that this came from the Westboro nutters/hypocrites, and if all identifying information were removed, what exactly would you be able to find fault with in this propaganda piece? As far as classical Christianity is concerned, this little tome on the passing of a heathen is dead-on, no pun really intended. Seriously, look it over and think about what this says. That is classic church doctrine on death and hell right there, so consistent with traditional protestant theology that it could have been written by an uneducated Jonathan Edwards himself. In fact, compare it to his most famous sermon “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God”: http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4yMTo0Ny53amVv

But does anyone care? Here in America, the majority of people just want to slander and denigrate, saying things like “Hatemonger!” and “Homophobe!”, and then following up their attack on ‘intolerance’ with plenty of intolerance of their own. Why? why do Americans feel such need to silence the truth of the Bible and Gospel message? Why is it so very important for them to make it all go away?

Because they prefer their sins, and would rather not be reminded of the consequences.

Thinking about God means having to think about the gap between us, our complete and utter failure to be Holy, and results in our bizarre love affair with denial and self-deception to avoid the truth of God’s Justice, Reality, and Wrath at any cost.

Even for American believers I see the need for distance; the more we think about God, the more the old teachings of fire and brimstone wrack us with guilt, rather than the need to run into the arms of our loving and forgiving Daddy who gave it all so that we are clean in His eyes, washed in his blood, saved by his Grace and Righteousness and by no doing of our own.

I think Americans are too wrapped up in guilt, and not in the Freedom that the Good News actually represents. Consequently, legalism and prejudice in the collective assemblies has resulted in the World seeing the Light of the Church not as a candle in the dark, and lamp to the safe way home, but a spotlight on one’s own failures and a crosshair of judgment; unsaved persons feel their own guilt and turn their self-loathing into rage against the people that make them feel guilty (either rightly or wrongly), and the saved spend far too much time navel-gazing and focusing on self, being drawn ever further away from God, instead of focusing on Him and letting Yeshua deliver and forgive. Christians don’t focus on God because they are too hung up on the negative aspects of God’s Holiness and the consequences for them, and not on the positive aspects and the Greatness of it all.